LinkedIn is launching a new app called 'Lookup' to help you quickly find and text coworkers

In April, LinkedIn got some interesting data about the way
people used its service. Out of everybody who uses
LinkedIn to search for other people, 30% view at least
one coworker's profile every month.

It may sound odd for those who work at a small company, but if
you're at a big enterprise with hundreds of thousands of
employees, it's not always easy to learn about coworkers who
you'll be working with on a new project.

Or if you need to find someone in a certain division, like a
technician, you often have to go through clunky intranet software
to find their contact info.

According to a recent LinkedIn survey, only 38% of professionals
use their companies' intranets effectively, with 58% saying
they'd do a much better job if they could find coworkers with
specific skill sets easily.

Instead, 46% of the survey respondents said they used LinkedIn to
look up coworkers, largely because of its ease-of-use and more
up-to-date profile information.

In order so solve this problem, LinkedIn released a new app called
"Lookup" on Wednesday. It's a simple app that will help you
quickly find coworkers and learn about their background. It also
has features that allow you to email and text message from
directly within the app.

You
can search for coworkers based on their specific
roles.LinkedIn
Lookup

The way it works is simple: download the free app and sign-in
using your company email address. Once you're in the app, you can
search and view the profiles of anyone within your company who
has a LinkedIn profile — even if they haven't downloaded
Lookup.

The app lists all the basic information you'd find on LinkedIn,
in addition to their company email address and cell phone number,
as long as the user elects to make them available. You
can also search based on a variety of categories, including their
name, title, division, or skills.

"The goal for this app is to find, learn about, and contact your
coworkers. It’s the fastest and easiest way to do
that," LinkedIn's senior product manager Ankit Gupta
told Business Insider. "There’s a huge demand for learning
about coworkers and that’s what we’re trying to solve here."

For example, if you search for someone on LinkedIn's main app, it
usually first shows people that you're connected with, making it
difficult to filter through the people working at your company.
The Lookup app only searches for people who work at your
company, essentially making it a more up-to-date employee
directory.

Gupta admits this is not a groundbreaking app with a whole lot of
new features. But he stresses it's an app that solves a
problem that has long been passed over, which could potentially
improve your work productivity.

"We're not replacing the intranet, butthis is something that hasn't been
tackled effectively yet," Gupta said. "What we want
to do is a very small but important thing — we want to help you
find and learn about each other because we believe that will make
you more productive."